In the Northwest: Indo-Canadians overcome setbacks to gain clout

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, May 12, 2005

SURREY, B.C. -- Upon rare mentions of this suburb south of the Fraser River, Vancouver's chattering classes used to repeat a radio host's jokes about living in a Surrey trailer court, or quip about ersatz pink flamingos decorating lawns.

It's also a home and vibrant cultural center to Indo-Canadians, a growing constituency of growing clout in British Columbia.

"I moved here in 1979 when there were 3,000 of us at most. Now there are 100,000," said Gurbir Gill, a local political activist. Indo-Canadians comprise more than a quarter of Surrey's population and are a courted constituency in British Columbia's election on Tuesday.

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Hong Kong émigrés have received most of the headlines in stories about Greater Vancouver becoming an international metropolis.

Many of the new Chinese Canadians of the 1990s brought dollars to invest, triggering a boom and stoking controversy over trees chopped down to build "monster" houses in sedate Vancouver neighborhoods.

The province's Indo-Canadians, who number about 300,000, arrived in more modest circumstances.

A young Punjab native named Ujjal Dosanjh immigrated to Canada in 1968, not yet fully fluent in English. He went to work in a sawmill but hurt his back. Dosanjh then went to the University of British Columbia Law School and emerged as a human rights attorney.

Dosanjh worked to secure bargaining rights for farm workers. He spoke out against the violence of Sikh nationalists and was hospitalized after a severe beating. He ran unsuccessfully for the B.C. Legislature.

In 1991, Dosanjh finally won a legislative seat. He rose to be the province's attorney general, and in 2000 became the first Indo-Canadian premier of a Canadian province.

He was voted out of office in 2001 but rebounded last year to win a seat in the federal Parliament. Dosanjh today is Canada's health minister.

Look around, and you will see similar rapid ascents.

The CBC's "Canada Now" news program, broadcast out of Vancouver, is hosted by Ian Hanomansing, a Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, native who has become one of his country's most prominent news personalities.

Fazil Mihlar, a Muslim born in Sri Lanka, is editor of the Vancouver Sun's editorial pages. He was previously a senior analyst at the conservative Fraser Institute and wrote studies championing deregulation.

Indo-Canadians have held down as many as three portfolios at once in the British Columbia Cabinet. Before Dosanjh, Vancouver businessman Herb Dhaliwal was Canada's minister of natural resources.

St. George's School, Vancouver's prestige private academy, launched an ad campaign some years back. It featured Canadian business barons -- white guys all -- talking about how prep school launched them down the path to mogulhood.

Several wags took it upon themselves to mail in a suggestion of the next St. George's dragon slayer to be featured: Moe Sihota.

Sihota was a brash young Victoria lawyer who, in 1986, became the first Sikh and first Indo-Canadian elected to a provincial legislature in Canada.

He would subsequently hold down the labor, education and environment portfolios in the British Columbia Cabinet.

"It's called employment. We started coming almost a century back to wherever the lumber business was thriving," said Baldev Duhre, a Surrey-based translator and author.

Indo-Canadians didn't settle just in Vancouver, though 200,000 now live in British Columbia's lower mainland. They went to mill towns.

Hence, populations of Indo-Canadians can be found in such interior mill towns as Merritt, Prince George and Quesnel, and at Squamish north of Vancouver en route to Whistler.

Along the way, Indo-Canadians had to endure -- but refused to accept -- often brutal discrimination.

Alarmed at their growing numbers, British Columbia took away their right to vote in 1907.

In 1908, Canada acted to stop immigration. It became law that immigrants to Canada had to arrive on a continuous voyage from their homeport. There was no direct shipping between India and Canada.

A ship, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver harbor on May 23, 1914, carrying 376 Sikh would-be immigrants from the Punjab. It sat there for two months until forced to leave by a Canadian naval cruiser.

Riots erupted on its return to Calcutta. A man named Mewa Singh assassinated an immigration inspector in Vancouver.

"Native people were at the bottom of the pecking order, but we felt we were below them," said Sue Takhar, another Surrey activist.

The voting franchise was not restored until 1947. Discrimination in immigration finally ended in 1967.

Indo-Canadians took none of this lying down. They helped organize the International Woodworkers of Canada, which won a living wage for forest workers. They moved into small business, in fields ranging from taxicabs to pizza parlors.

How critical? Out in Surrey last Sunday, about 4,000 male Indo-Canadians gathered at a local park for the national kabaddi tournament. Kabaddi is an exciting tag-team sport played by barefoot men in shorts.

On hand was B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, courting voters with the promise of $250,000 for new seating and washrooms at the kabaddi field. The governing BC Liberals have nominated a popular Sikh kabaddi player as one of their candidates for the Legislature.

Indo-Canadian candidates for the opposition New Democrats were also on hand. Moe Sihota (now a broadcaster) was loudly cheered as he led them onto the field.